Some thoughts on teaching core texts courses

CUHK-Shenzhen

At the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, I teach a variety of classes in Philosophy and Religious Studies, but I also teach a core (or "foundational") course in the humanities. It’s called "In Dialogue with Humanity," naturally enough, and was first designed and implemented at our “parent” campus in Hong Kong. 

In Dialogue with Humanity is primarily a seminar-style course. Most of the time spent in the class is in discussion sections (or "tutorials") in which close reading of global core texts is the main activity. Thus, the overall aim of the course is to acquaint students with a variety of important texts from different cultures, religions, and historical periods and to challenge students to develop the skills to approach and critically engage with difficult texts. Readings include Plato's Symposium, the Analects, the Zhuangzi, excerpts from the Bible and Qur'an, the Heart Sutra, Huang Zongxi's "Waiting for the Dawn," Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, and Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. To this, I also add excerpts from the Bhagavad-Gita and Elie Wiesel's Night. The faculty teaching this course give short lectures each week to help frame the texts so that students know better how to approach them in an informed way, but again, the main focus of the course is digging into passages and forming reasonable interpretations or applications of the ideas contained within. 

Passage from Sura 2 of the Qur'an (Islamic Arts Museum, Malaysia)

While I'm fascinated by these texts generally, I am particularly fond of the Warring States era Chinese philosophical text, The Zhuangzi (and especially in the context of this course). I first read from this book as an undergraduate at Occidental College, and I have long found its combination of humor and absurdity along with philosophical reflection to be delightful and confounding. The freedom that one finds in the pages of The Zhuangzi is freedom from the commitments and views of particular ways or “courses” (to follow along with Brook Ziporyn’s translation of dao (道). The freedom or spontaneity (ziran 自然) advanced in that book has, I think, the value of not judging or limiting a thing by standards that apply naturally to some other thing. This seems an important consideration to keep in mind when encountering texts important to distant times and places or for students to remember when reading texts rather distant from their major fields. I find this practical sense of freedom very attractive if also elusive and challenging to put into practice.

Brook Ziporyn's translation of The Zhuangzi

As students work through these varied texts, there's another sort of freedom that emerges from their studies. The freedom I have in mind is freedom of thought, which one develops through developing the capacities to think critically for oneself. There’s no one course that teaches this, or that could teach it, but different General Education courses collectively teach approaches to critical thinking rooted in particular fields and topics in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. 

Of course, one never really completes the process of learning how to think critically, freely. While I am in the role of teacher for courses like these in the General Education program, I also learn a great deal from my students in these courses as well as from rereading course material with the different experiences of a given year of my life before me. Hopefully, students will develop their own sense of appreciation for the values and skills of critical thinking (broadly construed) and they will continue to think and read about those areas, e.g., Philosophy or History, long after they have graduated.

In Dialogue with Humanity is just one course but it is a very important one at the university, challenging students to encounter a dramatically diverse set of views on big questions about life, meaning, the self, and society. The course offers students provocation to think for themselves and to become acquainted with texts that have been prized, even held as sacred (by some), across long histories and varied cultures. I love teaching the course and learn new insights into these texts and their ongoing relevance to critical thought every time I teach it.

The Gutenberg Bible (Library of Congress, Washington DC)

James Baldwin on San Francisco -- "Take this Hammer" (1964)

 Still image taken from "Take this Hammer (The Director's Cut)" (1964)

Today (August 2) is James Baldwin’s birthday. In honor of it, I thought I’d post some thoughts I wrote a while back (on Mastodon) on Richard O. Moore’s 1964 documentary (originally aired on PBS) “Take this Hammer,” which follows Baldwin on a visit to San Francisco. The point of the visit is to explore what the real situation is for Black San Franciscans, despite the myth of SF being a "liberal" city and what that might otherwise seem to suggest. A low quality version of the PBS version of the documentary is also available on YouTube:

Much of the film has to do with showing the structural racism (but not only structural racism) on display in SF, with the development and redevelopment of neighborhoods for profit and the forcing out of Black residents. Parts of the film may be familiar to viewers of other documentaries on Baldwin. At one point in the film, Baldwin says (as I attempted to capture it):

“I conclude that all this has something to do with money. The land has been reclaimed for money, and that the people who are putting up their houses expect to make a profit, but it seems to me I’m attacking what’s called a profit motive. There are some things that are more important than profits. I live in New York City, and it’s been turned into a desert really, for the same reason. And what’s happening in San Francisco now is that the society made the assumption or certainly acts from the assumption that to make money is more important than to have citizens.”

The film also deals with topics relating to religion, racism, and Black spiritual/cultural life. The themes relating to religion seem quite similar in general to the themes Baldwin explores in The Fire Next Time (1963). About 30 minutes in, Baldwin remarks, while looking at the burnt ruins of old St. Mary’s Cathedral (again, please forgive any errors in transcribing):

“I was raised a Christian, you know. My daddy and my momma were very religious. They knew that white Christians were not Christians because of the way they treated Black people. And the Christian Church in this country has never in my experience, never as far as I know, been Christian. The record is much more than shameful…The record proves that as we stand here as of this moment, the Christian church is bankrupt.”

There's also a director's cut of "Take this Hammer," which has an additional 15 minutes of content not included in the PBS version (with also a slightly different ordering of the conversations). It's available online at the Bay Area Television Archive at San Francisco State University.

https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/216518

This excerpt from the "about" section on the director's cut is telling:

In either form, I strongly recommend this film, especially for people interested in James Baldwin, the history of San Francisco, facing up to racism in American life, or all of the above.